After Dwight Eisenhower initiated the interstate highway system in the USA in the 1950s, there has been a steady effort to expand and "improve" it. In recent years, this has included adding highway lanes to "reduce" traffic problems. Click on the link below for a podcast that will help you understand the failure of this thinking in its stated goals and how other developed nations have done a better job in the planning of people movement in urban areas:
Why Do We Keep Widening Highways If It Doesn’t Reduce Traffic?
Showing posts with label Intuition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intuition. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Why Our Brains Tell Us There Is A God
All of us science-based thinkers know how difficult it is to dissuade people from accepting their intuition over the findings of science. There is no greater example of this than the issue of claiming God communicates with us personally/one-on-one. The last segment of a recent podcast from the Freedom From Religion Foundation focuses on the latest information on the subject by interviewing scientist and author John C. Wathey about his new book, The Phantom God: What Neuroscience Reveals about the Compulsion to Believe: "Wathey argues that the feeling of God’s presence is spawned by innate neural circuitry, similar to the mechanism that compels an infant to cry out for its mother. In an adult, this circuitry can be activated under conditions that mimic the extreme desperation and helplessness of infancy, generating the compelling illusion of the presence of a loving, powerful, and all-knowing savior. When seen from this perspective, the illusion also appears remarkably like one that has long been familiar to neurologists: the phantom limb of the amputee, spawned by the expectation of the patient’s brain that the missing limb should still be there."
Click on the link below for the podcast segment (timestamp approximately at 25:00):
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Are You Self-Aware Of HOW You Understand Reality?
Self-Awareness: how an individual consciously knows and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires. (Wikipedia)
One of the most difficult actions humans can take is to look at ourselves from the outside as others may see us without giving in to some of the cognitive biases that all of us tend to have. Some categories of opinions on reality that one can include in self-awareness are politics, economics, history, religion, and medicine.
In these, and other areas, are you forming your opinions to conform to "what you are taught?", or, do you question the claims of relatives, friends, religious organizations, political parties, and the media to which you are exposed? Is comfort or knowing the truth more important?
What tools do you use to decide what is true:
- personal feelings/intuition/revelations
- objective evidence
Friday, July 17, 2020
Religious Intuition: It's Natural
One of the most common apologetics for God and religion is the fact that such is universal in all human societies. Does that support the claim that, therefore, there MUST be a reality of a God behind it? Ah, no. The claim is just another example of the Argument from Ignorance/God of the Gaps. Below are two articles that clearly support the claim that religion and a belief in God are natural and evolved from pre-human animals, God is not necessary:
How and why did religion evolve?
Do humans have a "religious instinct"?
How and why did religion evolve?
Do humans have a "religious instinct"?
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Science Is Not Intuitive
"When science is discounted based on ideology, we all lose. But when
science is accepted based on authority or tradition, instead of critical
thinking and evidence, we also lose. We must be both skeptical and open
to new ideas and experiences to make progress. And as Richard Feynman
said, 'The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you
are the easiest person to fool.'"
http://discountedscience.blogspot.com/2015/01/preface.html
http://discountedscience.blogspot.com/2015/01/preface.html
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
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